Engage Your Users With a Combination of Collaboration and IM

Another competitor bursts into the fruity realm of web collaboration tools. Does Engage from MangoSpring offer anything new?

Springing Into Action

Engage is a new product launch, yet its feature set sounds rich and immediately familiar to anyone used to the range of trendy collaboration and enterprise 2.0 tools available on the market today. Comprising of profiles, teams, microblogs, instant messaging and those essential collaboration tools, everything seems pretty familiar so far.

However, the Idea Center part of the product offers a useful and differentiating twist, creating a focal point for new ideas and improvements on existing practices. With its life cycle feature, ideas that receive enough votes from the other users can are worked on and be promoted rather than left to wither and die.

Another area where MangoSpring has tried to innovate is in the enterprise social media-style features, not for Engage the dull grey office pallor, instead workers can be rewarded with awards, birthdays get a special mention while Facebook-style pokes are encouraged to liven up those interpersonal communications.

Perk up inter-business communications with a range of neat perks

Mr. LaForge, Engage

Engage is available in private (with enhanced security and VPN access) or shared SaaS editions and is packaged as free, standard (US$ 3.99 per user, per month) or premium (US$ 4.99 per user, per month). The system is available on the desktop, in a browser or on mobile with an iPhone and Android App available.

In use, Engage screams friendliness, the first pop-up allows you to change your password from the default auto-generated one to something more personal and memorable. As the first person from your company to set up your account, you can invite others to join in. Once a crowd is set up, projects can be created and worked on. Through a series of tabs, you can monitor your projects, private chats and colleagues. A toolbar at the bottom of the browser shows who is online and any relevant alerts.

Behind the Scenes

Communications can be handled in a number of ways, from wall posts, to chats, to private conversations. With LDAP and Open API integration, third-party applications and feeds can be integrated, while the whole scheme can be branded to match your company theme. For paid accounts, admins can monitor and manage the domain users and keep track of a range of usage statistics.

With a range of demos to view on the site, a sandbox demo to try out and the free version to sign up for and test, there are plenty of ways to see if Engage is right for you. While it lacks the document handling of some rivals, Engage is slick, professional and very well featured in every other area, and as its only at version 1, it has lots of room to grow and expand.